What an irony that the U.S. flag controversy at the kooky, leftist Hampshire College in Massachusetts should come so close to the death of Cuba’s Fidel Castro – a guy they idolize but who wasn’t so hip to such civil protest and free expression.

Castro reached room temperature Friday night, an apt Thanksgiving Day-after gift to both expatriate Cubans living in the U.S. and to the free world in general, but apparently not to folks who adored his spunky personality and the mass graves of his countrymen. Revolutionary communists and socialists the world over, and Canada, got all teary-eyed in their eulogies for the dictator, extolling him as a great leader and man of the people… at least of those he didn’t have executed.

But in lauding the now cremated communist and recounting with romantic vigor how he led a 1959 people’s coup against Fulgencio Batista, the previous thug dictator of Cuba, network news shows and other international fans are shying away from displaying any recent video of the country in order to avoid a display of just how poor and impoverished this great revolution left the island nation. Nearly 50 years of communism and friendship with the great socialist despots of the world never lifted the Cuban people out of abject poverty, as they struggled against both their own country’s ineffective economic management and U.S.-backed sanctions.

Nor do these hero-makers spend much time focusing on human rights topics under Castro’s regime. He executed thousands or even tens of thousands of political enemies after the revolution (no one really knows because most of the witnesses are dead), and choked off dissent with extensive and brutal internal spy networks and police forces. There were even spy networks to keep an eye on the spy networks.

The summation of Castro, then, makes it all the more interesting that hippie communes masquerading as accredited colleges like Hampshire College embrace leftist ideals, yet expect to enjoy civil disobedience like burning the U.S. flag and banning it from campus.

Hampshire College and a handful of other “alternative” education institutions are the very womb of western liberalism and Amero-socialism – one of those safe-space college campuses which most despise and condemn American life while they indulge in the greatest bounty America has to offer.

Enrollment is only about 1,500 undergrads. Forget the engineering degree or business major; Hampshire produces deep thinkers for deep thinking jobs funded by governments and charities – usually other classrooms or “think tanks” that draft anti-American policy. Fifty-six percent of its graduates have at least one graduate degree. Most of them – wait for it – doctorates in history. Keep in mind, these are the people and ideologies that most regale the now crispy Castro.

So it was Hampshire which lowered its flags to half-mast in protest of Donald Trump’s election, culminating in a Veterans’ Day flag burning on campus. The administration then took down all U.S. flags, saying they were a “disruptive symbol,” prompting a resulting counter-protest on Sunday of more than 1,000 people, including veterans, supporting Old Glory and demanding the flags be re-hoisted at Hampshire.

One must wonder, in a leftist Nirvana like the one Castro built and which so closely aligns in theory with the ideology pervasive among American leftists like those of Hampshire, how the burning of a Cuban flag would have been received at a college in that nation – and whether anyone would have lived to tell the tale?